Have That! - UMPC/ Gadget Blog (was Pocket Size)

TrackR2 head trackers arrived today! Pre-orders sent out and now in stock.

2008-09-19T13:07:00.010+01:00

At last they have arrived. The TrackR2 is now in stock. If you have been waiting for yours it has been sent out today.

If you'd like to order one now please go ahead here, we have a few left! We've already placed our next order for TrackR2s.

TrackR2 head tracker now in stock here

BMFA announce FPV is "a legal and insurable activity"

2008-09-19T13:07:00.007+01:00

The BMFA have recently announced that they have agreed with the CAA and their insurers to confirm that FPV is, in their words, "A legal and insurable activity".

There are a few guidelines that the BMFA would like us to follow:

After Consultations with the Civil Aviation Authority and our insurers, BMFA is happy to confirm that First Person R/C will be a legal and recognised aspect of model flying and as such covered by the BMFA Insurance policy but ONLY where the following conditions are applied:

• The activity is solely for ‘sport and recreation’ purposes.

• Two pilots must take part

• A buddy Box system must be employed

• The pilot in charge must operate the master transmitter

• The pilot in charge must not wear the headset or view a screen

• The aircraft remains within the natural unaided visual range of the pilot in charge

• Reliable operation of the Buddy Box is established

• A clear handover protocol is established

• The pilot in charge is solely responsible for the safety of the flight

These operating conditions very clearly place the legal responsibility for the safety of the flight on the pilot in charge.

Only by compliance with the above procedures can First Person RC take place as a lawful and insurable aspect of model flying activity.

Manny Williamson
Development Officer

Link to the full press release on the BMFA website

5th in the queue on launch day but still 17 days until I get my iPhone!

2008-07-17T19:37:00.002+01:00

Reviews from me have so far been pretty thin on the ground and I'm sorry. Its not that I'm being lazy, or even that I'm too caught up in playing with all of the great new App Store software to sit down and write, no its much worse than that. I STILL don't have an iPhone!

I thought I was being cunning by selling my G1 iPhone a couple of days before the announcement of the 3G. I got a good price and I thought I'd only have a few days to wait to pick up the next model... Alas, Steve Jobs made us wait a month between his announcement and the release, and then to my dismay, Charles Dunstone has got me waiting another 2 weeks.

For those of you who don't know, old Charlie is the MD of "The Carphone Warehouse". An "independent" phone shop chain that has 700 stores in the UK and a deal to sell iPhones on the o2 network alongside the Apple and o2 shops.

I am now being told that my iPhone will most likely be delivered on Monday 28th July. And its not like I just ordered it either, I queued for 3 hours at the opening of my local store and was the 5th person to the desk!! Unfortunately my local CPW (Brighton, Western Road) had been delivered 10 x 8gbs and only 2 x 16gbs.

Being number 5 I was given the choice of an 8gb iPhone there and then, or a 16gb delivered to my home the next day. The manager assured me that there were over 1500 in the warehouse when I ordered and that one of those was allocated to me for next day delivery. So I walked out £59 lighter, signed up to a £45 per month tariff with nothing more than a SIM card to show for my 3 hour wait!

Of course Saturday came and went, Monday came and went, I was told Friday delivery, then I was told that that delivery was only 8gbs, so I am now being told that the next delivery will be Friday 25th which should mean it actually gets to me on Monday July 28th. 17 days after I queued!

The best part is that I got my first o2 bill this morning! £45 for the month and I haven't even got a phone!

Anyhow, you can rest assured that I have my eye on a number of apps that I'd like to try out and review and as soon as I have something to install it on I will be writing here!

Charles Dunstone, if you're reading this, sort it out mate!

iPhone - it got me!

2008-04-27T02:41:00.004+01:00

When I heard that the price of the iPhone 8gb was being reduced to £169 on the Tuesday evening before it happened I decided to finally get one. I was 90% convinced to get one anyhow, but this was the final push.

I was up early and down to my closest Carphone Warehouse by 9.10am. They confirmed the new price, which they had seen on their intranet only a few moments before, and I was their first customer of the day.

A week later I was back there to buy a second one, and they were all gone. Carphone Warehouse have confirmed that they've sold the lot (see the Register’s article here: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/25/uk_iphone_clear_out/) and o2 have only a few left in their retail stores and not a single one in their online store.

It’s really amazing to see how well this marketing strategy worked. To my mind they are clearly selling off their stock of 8gb before the launch of the 3g/ v2 iPhone which is expected by many to be announced on the 9th May at the WWDC.

Even knowing that the 3g version is imminent I decided that £169 is a great price for the iPhone, and I'm very pleased with that decision. It's just incredible.

The interface is fantastic and the best feature to me is the browser. It is by far and away the best mobile browser I have ever used. Compared to Safari on the Nokia E90 it is a completely different world. The way the iPhone's Safari handles scrolling and zooming is fantastic and the speed to load is like nothing I've experienced on a mobile device. Where my E90 will often fall down and not let me into certain web sites, my hosting control panel for instance, the iPhone sails through and loads the pages perfectly and quickly. I don't think I've come across a single website that the iPhone can't handle and the iPhone on GPRS will give the E90 a run for its money on HSDPA in loading a heavy website.

Text input on the iPhone is also superb, which is really surprising considering the absence of any kind of the keyboard. The on screen keyboard is very well done and the software which works out your mistakes and automatically corrects them for you is the really clever part - this allows me to type on the iPhone really very quickly. Coming from a die-hard “I need a qwerty keyboard on my phone” guy, that might be surprising.

There are a couple of areas where it shows that this is Apple's first attempt at a phone. It's not that anything is broken or badly written, it’s just that the iPhone is missing a few things that I've come to expect from a phone these days. 3G - 3.5G HSDPA in fact, Copy and Paste, Exchange ActiveSync, VoIP SIP client, Bluetooth stereo headset profile, and Bluetooth keyboard profile are my main issues.

A lot of those issues, if not all of them, will be fixed in the v2.0 firmware/ the v2/ 3G hardware I think and that will make the iPhone truly great.

The simplicity with which an extremely sophisticated piece of technology with fantastically clever software is presented to the user in this device has really got me interested in Apple products. The analogy of a "gateway drug" popped into my head a week or so ago. I thought that was perhaps because of the place I live, Brighton, which has held the infamous title as the place with the most drug related deaths in the country for the last 5 years (second to Blackpool this year I believe), but I heard Dan, Brandon, Patrick and Judie use the same term in the Podcast that they did here at JustAnotheriPhoneBlog: http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/2008/04/24/just-another-iphone-chat-come-join-in-with-us-next-monday-night/ so I'll go ahead and use it as well.

I agree with what those guys said in their super-long discussion, the iPhone IS a gateway drug and already I find myself warming to the idea of Mac. It’s only been a week and a half and I'm almost converted...good work Steve Jobs! If it wasn't for my obsession with UMPCs, and there being no UMPC from Apple, there would be no contest. I would happily use a mobile Mac device, although I'd probably keep an IBM-compatible (does anyone say that anymore?) PC on my desk, to begin with. And before anyone says it, no I don't class the Macbook Air as a UMPC.

In the JustAnotheriPhoneBlog Podcast the guys (and gal) disagreed amongst themselves about how they think the Apple Software Store will work. Patrick made the assertion that it's unlikely that Apple will have the man power to manually sit down and test every single application produced by third parties before making it available to the paying public. Brandon disagreed and thought that this is most likely what will happen, with a small number of quality sealed apps coming out that have been tested to destruction (perhaps employing automated testing tools for a lot of the grunt work). This sparked an interesting little debate; would we rather have a few very well tested, authorised, approved applications that will be rock solid stable and pose no risk to the ongoing stability of our iPhones, or a much more open market where we can make the decision for ourselves?

I don't know what my answer to that is. What I actually want is both...thousands of apps from tons of vendors that are all 100% reliable! I don't like iTunes, I never have. I much prefer the way my Nokia handles MP3s. The Nokia detects as a drive letter, you drag your MP3s on to it, and then you play them on the phone. If you want to copy them back again, go ahead. iTunes is a good deal more fussy than that and I'm sure iTunes will handle software purchases the same way that it handles MP3s. I'm already starting to prepare myself for that.

I jailbroke my iPhone less than 10 minutes after I got it home and I have been enjoying using the many applications and games available through the installer. Labyrinth, an iPhone version of those wooden tilting games where you have to guide a big ball bearing around a track with holes in it, is just the best use of the accelerometer I've seen. I even stumped up the 7 Euros and bought the 270 extra levels!

I also like Lockbox, by Nathan Black, which I've entered all of my important information into and can now access with just one password. Todo is also proving very useful, although this is one that I hope Apple releases in the v2.0 firmware and has it synchronising with Outlook through ActiveSync. A pre-release version of Fring came out the day that I got my iPhone and I stuck that straight on there. This goes some way towards fulfilling my VoIP SIP client requirement but unfortunately it’s not good enough. I can't make reliable calls at all. It does allow you to be connected to VoIP through Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, SIP, Google Talk and instant text messaging through Twitter, Yahoo, and AIM and I'd love to blame the pre-release status for the poor/ lack of performance but having tried Fring on a few Nokia phones I have to say that I've never really got it to work. At this point I’m just not sure it’s very good. I’d love to be proved wrong on that though.

I have also used Terminal to connect to SSH to a remote server and, whilst writing this, I have installed VNCsea - the native VNC client for the iPhone which has been broken on Installer every time I've tried to download and install it over the last week. Now I've got it installed it won't actually connect to my PC, but I'm sure I can sort it given a little time and it looks pretty good so far.

So in summary the iPhone is a very different device to my usual mobile (the Nokia E90) but, apart from a few small items that the new firmware and the new hardware will fix soon enough, I think that Apple have unceremoniously finished my affair with Nokia. And I won't be going back to Windows Mobile any time soon either.

2.4Ghz Spectrum Analyser/ WiFi/ WiSpy

2008-04-09T15:47:00.009+01:00

I have been looking at a WiSpy 2.4Ghz Spectrum Analyser with Chanalyzer software and also InSSIDer with a high gain WiFi USB dongle over the past couple of days.

The graphs produced are mind boggling at first but quite interesting. From the various outputs I have discovered that my TV sender is very strong and always transmitting, the flat above have their WiFi AP (SSID Bruce 10) on channel 6 and its very strong in here and that there is a load of noise on channel 11 from 6 other WiFi networks nearby.

So using all of this information I have done the following; moved my TV sender to AV Channel 1 (2.414GHz) - which you can see on the far left of the graphs between WiFi Channel 1 and 2 and I have moved my WiFi from Channel 11 to Channel 13.

On the middle Topographic view you can see the neighbour's WiFi mushroom on channel 6 and mine on channel 13.

Metageek's InSSIDer will run with just a normal WiFi card and I'd recommend giving it a quick try, or else just make sure your WiFi isn't on channel 11. Chanalyzer, also from Metageek, is a bit more specialist and requires the WiSpy USB dongle which you can buy from firstpersonview.co.uk here.

It's snowing in Brighton!

2008-04-06T14:32:00.004+01:00

We've had more snow in the last 24 hours in Brighton than we did in a week in the alps when I was there last month!

Nokia BH-503 Bluetooth Headphones and Nokia SIP client echo

2008-04-03T13:20:00.007+01:00

I have been playing with the Nokia BH-503 Bluetooth Stereo headphones for the past couple of days. I've got to say that overall they are great and a far cry from the Sony Ericsson HBH-65 which I have in my desk drawer, decommisioned very shortly after it was purchased several years ago.

The Nokia headphones sound great, are comfortable, and Bluetooth seems to work OK 90% of the time. There is the odd crackle and pop when on a phone call, music occasionally stops momentarily for no apparent reason but overall they're great. Yesterday I listened to 3 45 minute-ish Podcasts and 4 or 5 music albums and for a good deal of that time they worked flawlessly.

Unfortunately I have found a couple of problems with the Nokia SIP client/ Bluetooth combination.

1) The call button can not be used to answer an incoming VoIP call. It works fine with a cellular call but not with SIP. This seems to be a known issue.

2) The other party hears a very prominent echo of their own voice when on a VoIP call. Again this doesn't happen with a cellular call.

I've mentioned it this thread on the N95 website http://www.n95users.com/forum/connectivity/5359-bluetooth-over-sip-client.html

I really hope Nokia fix this in the new firmware versions of the SIP client as it is a big issue for me.

Please let me know if you have the same issue, or even better, if you don't have this issue but you use a bluetooth headset and the Nokia SIP client.

BT VideoPhone1000 - will it work with other SIP providers?

2008-04-03T12:51:00.005+01:00

The BT VideoPhone1000 is now down to £39.99 from BT, £69.99 for a pair and its even cheaper elsewhere. Its supposed to be used with BT's servers and they charge per mintue for calls, etc. I wondered whether it is possible to get it working with other VoIP providers including my own Askozia PBX.

From a little bit of reading of this thread I have discovered that the phone is a standards compliant SIP phone but it has the sip gateway address hardcoded and in the later firmwares the phone must make a connection to a BT HTTPS server otherwise the phone stops working.

If you have firmware 0.5.3.96 there is a way forward (just be sure not to connect it to the internet until you've read the rest), if you have another firmware unfortunately there is no way forward at the moment but Nosilla99 on the Scream forums is working on a possible solution.

The phone automatically connects to a server to download new firmware so if you have a phone with firmware version 0.5.3.96 there are two things that you must do (don't connect the phone to the internet before you've done this!):

1) Block the phone from updating its firmware from www.videophone1000.bt.com (you'll need to run a DNS server and make sure that that address does not get through to bt.com)
2) Re-route the address that the phone tries to connect to BT's SIP servers at sip.btsip.bt.net so that it is actually routed to your PBX, or SIP service (using your DNS server).

I have set my Monowall router up as a DNS forwarder which publishes itself as the DNS when it dishes out DHCP. I've then set it to override the DNS responses for those two addresses. This seems to be working fine when I do an NSlookup test.

All of this information came from Nosilla99 at the www.the-scream.co.uk/forums.

Nokia N800

2008-03-31T11:00:00.005+01:00

I have recently been playing with a Nokia n800 to fill the gap between my EeePC and nokia E51. These are my thoughts on it.

First thing i did was put Nokia's Tablet OS 2008 (Linux) on it which makes it the same spec as a N810 without a keyboard or GPS. Nokia provides easy software to do this.

Its battery life and instant resume are brilliant, its great to have an internet device quickly available at all times.

The operating system is great, easy to use with just thumbs. The full screen keyboard is very handy for entering stuff when you dont have a surface to work on. Multitasking etc is fast and easy. The very clean, tight OS with custom apps makes the Eee's linux seem pretty rubbish.

The web browser is the best i've used on such a device, it can even play youtube flash videos ok. Bookmarks are easy to launch from the home screen with thumbs also.

There is also Skype, Gtalk, POP3, Imap, RSS, SIP support etc all installed as standard.

There is a good software community around it, the ones i've found to be good are:

Mplayer - plays most divx files absolutly fine, some frame skipping on higher res stuff, great for watching tv on. The built in stand is ideal for this.
RDesktop - Remote desktop client, unfortunatly does not work with the n800's software keyboard so is pretty useless, better on the n810 or with a bluetooth keyboard of course. One day maybe it will be completed?
SDL Quake - Pretty unplayable with the interface but its amusing to see something from ID running on a small device.
SSH Client - Command line app, does exactly what it says, surprisingly usable. Shown in the pic connecting to a linux machine and running BitchX IRC client.
Battle Gweled - Bejeweled!

I've just ordered myself a pair of Nokia Bluetooth headphones to use with my various nerd toys (Dell Dimension E521, EeePC 701 4G, Nokia N800, Nokia E51) and hopefully will be able to set them up according to this guide http://geekpenguin.blogspot.com/2007/09/bluetooth-headphones-made-easy.html Making it a great portable MP3/DivX etc player.

Other than that, I paid £120 used for this device and think it represents great value for money. The GPS and keyboard enabled n810 is quite a lot more expensive, more than I can justify at the moment but looks to be a nice improvement.

Fab Fairies for sale!

2008-03-27T11:26:00.011Z

Saara (my girlfriend) has finished her first batch of greetings cards and they are for sale in Giftz Store (www.giftzstore.co.uk/)in the south lanes of Brighton and will soon also be in Chocky Wocky Doo Dah in Brighton as well.

I'm very proud of her. It's taken her nearly 3 years to get these to market but shes done it and I really hope they sell!

Its amazing that they have done a big promotion for them in the front window and a very prominent position as you walk in! Check out the photos!

She is now working on a new website to sell them through, but if you fancy one (or more) let me know, I'm sure I can arrange it!

Free AVG doesn't say "Checked by AVG Free Edition" on my emails anymore

2008-03-09T12:29:00.003Z

I'm not sure if its intentional or not but I've noticed that since my free AVG updated itself yesterday it no longer says "Checked by AVG Free Edition" on my sent and received email, instead it now says "Checked by AVG."

The release notes mention "Minor text improvements to the GUI", perhaps that's what they mean?

If its intentional its an interesting decision. I almost feel guilty for persuading several people who use AVG to upgrade to the paid for version on the basis that not only is it fairer to Grisoft but it also looks better to their customers to not say "Free Edition" (IE license agreement infringement) on their footers.

Kingston PCMCIA Bluetooth VoIP Phone

2008-02-27T19:29:00.002Z

I'm not sure why but I'm strangely intrigued by this device! As far as I can work out its basically a bluetooth headset that is the shape of a PCMCIA card. The idea seems to be that it lives in your PC card slot, keeping itself charged, and then you pop it out when you want to make a call.

Morgan Computers have it for £24 which is tempting just to investigate, but I really can't justify yet another VoIP phone device to myself or anyone else...

If anyone has one, or buys one, please let me know what it does/ how well it does it!

http://www.morgancomputers.com/shop/detail.asp?ProductID=4508&CategoryID=203&SubCategoryID=352

Dreamweaver CS3 - 99% CPU usage!

2008-02-27T19:22:00.003Z

I've had a couple of bad experiences with the 30 days trial of Dreamweaver CS3 so far. I'm glad its a free trial and that I haven't just paid out!

It just straight won't install on my Core 2 Duo, 2gb RAM, Vista desktop machine. The installer disappears half way through. Adobe are working on the problem apparently...

So I tried it on my Fuji P1610 which is running XP Tablet. It installed fine and seems to work OK, except that the dreamweaver.exe process always uses 97-99% CPU, even when the software is minimized. That seems a bit much...

I found a patch here which has solved the problem but its not an Adobe file so be wary. Please don't blame me if it does something unexpected!

More bandwidth - UKonline = stupid!

2008-02-27T19:14:00.003Z

Occasionally my VoIP phones are affected by my downloading/ uploading activity. For instance loading a heavy web page whilst on a call sometimes makes the call hiccup for a second.

I have tried packet shaping but my router (Monowall) is only any good at packet shaping with fixed pipes apparently - EG you might setup a 128kbps/64kbps pipe for VoIP and leave the rest for everything else. This guarantees the bandwidth is reserved for your VoIP.

The problem I found with that is that it brings me down to a speed where I can't watch streaming video smoothly...no YouTube!?!? Can't be having that.

So I figured the best thing to do is upgrade my hosting account to 8mb (from my current poultry 2mb) and then implement the packet shaping.

Alas no! Despite me having been a customer for 2 years, and being a year out of the minimum contract UKOnline can't turn up my package without me signing a new 12 month contract. This seems like madness to me.

I'll have to stick with the 2mb for now then because we're planning to move house in the next 12 months.

Elonex One £99 laptop

2008-02-22T10:22:00.005Z

Asus' low cost EEE PC has certainly shaken up the UMPC sector with it now being commonplace for people to describe the price of every other device in terms of how many EEE PCs could be bought for the same money - EG "Thats the same as 4 EEE PCs".

With that going on its very hard to justify buying a device that costs up to the same as 10 EEE PCs!!

The same thing may be about to happen again/ for the laptop market as a whole. The Elonex One PC will be priced at £99 and will release 6 days from now on the 28th Feb.

Read the press release here

I wonder if we will soon hear people describing an EEEPC as 2/2.5 Elonex Ones!

Top Apps for Symbian S60

2008-02-20T23:34:00.007Z

GigaOm have published an interesting list of their top S60 apps. Since I am a recent convert to S60 I found it interesting and I thought I'd share the ones that people might like to use (and a link to the full list of course).

"Gmail for Mobile" app for S60 which was voted the best piece of software for S60. I don't use Gmail but I'm sure this will be very useful for those of you who do.

The number 2 slot goes to GooSync which synchs your calendar and contacts with Google as well. Again I can see that this is very useful. I use Exchange myself and Nokia provide a client for this (Na, Na, Na!)

Kevin Tofel at JKontherun.com reckons that JoikuSpot should have been on the list. I agree with you Kevin in principle, but so far I've found that it doesn't actually work. Even if it does work for you it will only support HTTP, so no VPNs or anything along those lines for the moment.

My friend who runs an EEE PC on the factory Linux install (he's got bored of XP!) was looking forward to using JoikuSpot instead of trying to get Bluetooth and Dial Up Networking working on Linux. So far it doesn't work for him either, and HTTP is a bit useless to him anyway because if you put him near a PC he'll have established a VPN and then loaded an RDP client to his work server before you can blink.

Hopefully Joikuspot will end up as good as WMWifiRouter for Windows Mobile. Its definately got potential and it seems that a great team are working on it.

The one that caught my eye was item 9 on GigaOm's list: Nokia Podcasting Application. The premise is that you can download and manage your podcast subscriptions on your Nokia itself. Podcasts are the only reason that I still have iTunes installed so this could mean I can get rid of the horrible thing for good!

I will install it and give it a try. I'll report back in a week or so.

Logitech Quickcam 3000 on Windows Vista

2008-02-20T23:11:00.003Z

I tried this evening to do a video conference with my Grandparents up North. My sister was there last week and I talked her through installing MSN Messenger on my Grandma's laptop (which conveniently has built in webcam, microphone, etc).

So this evening I also installed MSN Messenger myself (I haven't used IM software for 3 years or more for distraction/ productivity reasons), installed my Quickcam 3000 from Logitech on my Fuji P1610 and made the call. It connected and we could see each other but the video was juddery and the sound kept looping so that she sounded like a scratch DJ was involved! He-He-He-Hello Simon...etc.

So next I decided to switch to my desktop machine. It's much more powerful and its not going through WiFi. Then I spent hours and hours trying to get the camera to install...

It turns out that Logitech don't support anything before a 4000 on Vista. There is a way around it but in the long threads on the subject on Logitech's forums every time someone posts the solution Logitech say it is against the terms of use and delete the post!! I guess they want you to upgrade your camera...

I eventually found the instructions (basically uninstall all of your bad attempts and then reinstall the XP software) on this blog: http://blog.avanadeadvisor.com/blogs/johanr

I figure the more links to Johan's instructions on Google the better, hence this post.

To finish my story, after this we tried again and the results were superb. Really good full screen quality with proper lip synching, no juddering, no looping audio. I was very very impressed. Its much better than its been when I've played with it before.

Hymer motorhomes - I want one!

2008-02-19T12:08:00.004Z

Rather than paying £650+ per week to hire a camper van this summer I've persuaded a mate, who was also separately planning to hire a camper van for a week or two, that we should invest in one!

From what I've been told they don't really depreciate so we should be able to keep it for a year and sell it for about what we paid. Saving ourselves at least £2600 in fees that we would have paid for renting!

So I'm on the look out for a Hymer 5 berth motorhome (which really means 2 berth) and my budget is £6000. This one on ebay looks great and finished at £5000 - perfect! The only thing is that the dealer had a reserve of £13500 on it!

Can anyone offer any tips or advice to us as first time camper van buyers?

Please note that this is related to Mobile Tech in some ways...if you think about it. Hehe. Also with two geeks owning it I'm sure it will have plenty of toys in it before long.

OQO 2 for £865 from Expansys!

2008-02-19T11:13:00.003Z

I have often said that the OQO is great, but too expensive. Only yesterday I posted an entry about the e2 and said exactly that. However, OQO are getting rid of some of their older models through Expansys and you can now pick up a brand new very shiney OQO model 2 for only £865 inc VAT! Thats the relatively low spec OQO model 2, 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD, Vista Business and it will have the US keyboard (not much difference the UK one).

This is very tempting!

Expansys have a selection of OQO models at reduced prices and plenty of them in stock. Personally I would probably go for the OQO model e2 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, Vista Ultimate for £969 inc VAT.

There are also XP models available on the Expansys website.

Orange to sell HTC Shift "Exclusively" (well they'll be the only UK network to start with at least)

2008-02-19T11:01:00.005Z

A press release from Orange's PR company today announces that they will carry the Shift exclusively and that it will be available before the end of February.

It's good to see a major phone carrier picking up the torch for UMPCs and I hope this gets the form factor in front of a lot more people...even if the Shift is very old news now.

The pricing is a little strange though. Orange will be selling the device for £999 with a contract, whereas you can pick one up from Expansys with a contract for £580 and Clove Technology have them SIM-free for a little over £800!

Via UMPCPortal.com

OQO e2 - What is it for?

2008-02-18T23:51:00.005Z

I pretty much started off this Blog by writing about the OQO Model 01+ which I owned quite recently. Its a fantastic piece of engineering and design which is fatally flawed by a number of defects. Since then OQO have lent me their newer model on three separate occasions to ask for my thoughts so, at the risk of going over old ground, I thought I should put down my latest thoughts about their product.

During the time since I owned the 01+ and now my thoughts/ feelings about UMPCs have changed a little and I'm left with the question "What are they for?".

Recently I've gone for a high feature mobile phone and a big UMPC, what some would call UPPC (Ulta-Portable PC). Those being a Nokia E90 Communicator and a Fujitsu Siemens P1610-HSDPA respectively.

This is the best combination of devices that I've had the pleasure of owning and using to date. Firstly the Fuji is just superb for portability but also usability...I can work on it at a desk with an external mouse all day and not feel cramped. Sometimes I do that and occasionally I venture outside and use it on Brighton beach. Why not? The screen is daylight readable, it has built in 3g and it'll even flip around and be a touch screen tablet which I've found surprisingly useful.

The Nokia is also superb. Most importantly, and notably different from my previous phone - the HTC Hermes, is the fantastic battery life. Often at the end of the day I put it on charge and its still reporting full battery...I'm a heavy user and I have the WiFi connected for the E90 to act as a VoIP phone, Bluetooth on, I use the GPS with Nokia Sportstracker when I go out walking, etc, etc. Its also a very very solid phone with great software and its got a surprise attribute that I like...My girlfriend will happily pick it up and make a call from it. She knows how to use it straight off...because its a Nokia...a standard-ish Nokia interface with hardware buttons, unlike my previous phones. Its also a decent RSS feed reader, speakerphone, web browser, radio, etc, etc.

Now the OQO model 02/ E2 is supposed to fit somewhere between these two devices, in my other pocket perhaps. The question is what does it do that my Fuji can't do? The Fuji is always in my backpack. What can it do that my E90 can't do?

The answer is this: it can do anything your desktop can do, reliably, every time. What I mean by that is that, whilst its not my choice for Blogging or anything involving proper sit down "work time" what the OQO does is give you a platform to log into web interfaces, connect to servers, use Office files, etc. from your pocket.

The Fuji doesn't fit in your pocket, not by a long shot, and if you try to do certain things with a Nokia Communicator you'll be left frustrated. Casing point: I provide hosting and hosted Exchange mailboxes for several companies and I have a web control panel to my providers.

When I get a call to reset a password, create a new mailbox, set up a new website, etc. I can log in to the web interface and make the change instantly. I have tried doing that from the Communicator several times and wasted ages trying to get logged in. Its a heavy page with a gotcha and it just won't load properly on the E90. I've ended up phoning someone and talking them through how to make the change for me!

There are numerous examples of sites that, for whatever reason, don't work on the S60browser and there are plenty that don't work on the Nokia 770's browser either. For the foreseeable future this will most likely be the case for all mobile browsers...web sites just aren't tested on every mobile platform.

Its the same with PC based software if you need to use that for your job, or perhaps so that you can offer technical support wherever you are (as a micro company owner I sometimes need to do this). Non-Windows portable devices just can't compete here.

But give me an OQO in my spare pocket, with HSDPA, and wherever I am I can fire up Internet Explorer, log into my control panel and do what I need to do. For a short, sharp, fix I'm not sure the OQO can be beaten. Its very small and its optimised for the task. The screen is as big as it possibly can be on the chassis, the keyboard is probably as good as it can be, its got HSDPA, etc. I'd rather have a touch screen and the pen should certainly stow somewhere on the device and be much more accurate, but those are relatively minor things.

The only problem with the OQO really is the price. I certainly can't justify having my E90 in my left trouser pocket, my Fuji 1610 in my back pack AND £1600s worth of emergency OQO in my right pocket...

But if you need most of the functionality of a laptop in your pocket for short bursts of work, or perhaps browsing on your commute and you can justify the cost I highly recommend the OQO e2 HSDPA 1.6Ghz 1GB 32GB SSD. OQO sell through Expansys in the uk www.expansys.co.uk

JoikuSpot turns your Symbian S60 phone into a WiFi hotspot

2008-02-18T23:39:00.003Z

I posted a while back about WMWifiRouter for Windows Mobile devices which is a clever series of scripts/registry hacks bundled up into a neat little application that makes your WM phone act as a WiFi Access Point. Its a very clever piece of software and if it wasn't for the absolutely atrocious battery life that I had on my last Windows Mobile phone (HTC Hermes), I may have found it quite useful.

Now the battery life on my Nokia E90 Communicator is amazing, even with Bluetooth and WiFi on all day and the occasional hour of GPS use in a day I can still often put my phone on charge in the evening with it still reporting fully charged! Of course its lying but the battery life is fantastic. I have never run out of battery in a day. Its sharp contrast to my HTC Hermes which would last about an hour with WiFi on.

So what about the E90, is there something similar for Symbian S60? Yes! Now there is! A piece of freeware called JoikuSpot claims to do exactly the same thing!

Unfortunately in my testing the software crashes if I have my (normally permanent) WiFi SIP connection open and if I disable that it appears to work but none of my other devices could detect the WiFi network that it says it is offering up.

Hopefully a new release will address my problems in the near future because this could be very handy. Give it a go on your device and please do post a comment on here about how you get on. The download is available at http://www.joikuspot.com/aboutJoikuSpot.php

Via Thoughtfix

Askozia PBX

2008-02-18T22:56:00.012Z

I've been using the Askozia PBX for about a month now for my small business at home and I wanted to quickly share my results.

Previously I used VoIP.co.uk directly over the internet. First of all with a cheap WiFi phone from ebay (Senao I think, it looked like a Nokia 6310). This was useless because it cut out the call after 45 seconds every time...

Then I upgraded to a ZyXEL Prestige 2000W V2 VoIP WiFi which was much better. Sometimes the call quality was not so good for the other party but it always sounded fine for me! (A word of warning: This doesn't support WPA).

Then I upgraded to Cisco fixed phones with a Cisco 7940 big feature phone (pictured above) and a Cisco 7912 desk phone. On top of that I've now got a Linksys ATA for my DECT phone, and the Nokia E90 Communicator which makes a superb WiFi SIP client.

VoIP.co.uk is very feature packed. You can have many different lines within one VoIP.co.uk, you can have many different devices in your account and set which numbers go to which lines, have call groups essentially, do voicemail which is emailed to you, do all sorts of stuff.

Up until a month or so ago I have always lived with niggles. Sometimes the other person wouldn't be able to hear me, sometimes I wouldn't be able to hear them, sometimes the call would drop, etc.

So I decided to take NAT out of the equation and run my own PBX. I built a MiniITX diskless, fanless PC from www.mini-itx.com (identical to my Monowall router) and chose the Askozia PBX project for my PBX. Askozia is basically a GUI for Asterisk but its presented as a nice simple download and a nice easy web interface. No complicated Linux or Asterisk to worry about.

My results so far have been excellent, and the functionality that the PBX offers is incredible and growing with every release. As an example I now have three SIPGate accounts, each with one number. These are setup in Askozia and the system is set to ring my call group "All Phones" if I get a call on any number...the clever part is I have set the PBX to prefix the callerID with each of my company names.

So when someone calls number 1 the callerID on my phones comes up with "Company1 - 01234123123" so that I know how to answer the phone. This is really useful for me as a small (micro?) business with a few brands but its only scratching the surface of what Askozia can do.

The best part is so far I haven't had any call drop outs and I seem to have ironed out all of the sound problems (I had some problems to start with with the codecs supported by the Ciscos and Askozia not being right).

VoIP.co.uk only intermittently works with my Askozia box so I've canned that and diverted all of the numbers in my account to my 3 SIPgate accounts (SIPgate accounts are free). Its a shame that VoIP.co.uk isnt reliable because it has a lot of features where SIPGate is very very minimalist...but ultimately its reliability that matters and that's what my SIPGate/ Askozia combination seems to give me (fingers crossed).

Askozia is an open source active public beta project and the development team are very keen to hear of bugs, etc. If you want to run a small, non-critical PBX but don't want the hassle of Asterisk, etc. have a look at it and perhaps get involved. www.askozia.com

YouTube! - Can't post a comment!

2008-02-18T22:53:00.004Z

I thought I'd put this little tip on here in case people are having the same problem and can't find a solution as I couldn't despite trying different browsers, different computers, reading the help, googling, etc.

On YouTube you cannot post a comment if it includes a URL (or HTML code). The interface doesn't tell you this, it just makes the text of your comment go grey and sits there. Not very intuitive!

I hope this helps someone who is tearing out their hair trying to reply to a comment!

What I'm up to! www.firstpersonview.co.uk!

2008-02-18T22:48:00.005Z

Hi all,

I haven't posted here for a little while so I thought I'd let everyone know that I'm still alive and I'm devoting all of my time on setting up a few other projects at the moment.

One of these is www.firstpersonview.co.uk which I've been working on for a little while and has now started to ship. Its great fun and very interesting developing this stuff and its great to see people starting to use our gear/ posting videos using it on YouTube, etc.

I've embedded a sample video:

In the next few days I'll post new video filmed with our new head movement system that detects when you move your head and moves the camera on the plane accordingly! Just awesome!

I'll be back Blogging about gadgets before long. See you soon!

Simon